"...But should you, naturally and without hearing
Anyone knock, come to your door, unbar it
And find somebody waiting (it appears)
To dare to knock, give it some thought. It was
My emmissary and I and the retinue of my glorying
In what drives to despair and what despairs.
Unbar to who does not knock at your door!"
"Should Somebody One Day," Fernando Pessoa, (5.9.34)
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Billy Ray Belcourt's debut Novel "A Minor Chorus" is the first stop on my tour of moving referents.
I acquired my copy in the winter of 2024, a time when I was deeply aspiring after the life of an industrial craftsperson from my kitchen whites. Vividly I remember treating a stove burn on that afternoon. I had gone to find a book to multiply the microscopic weight of my atrophied reading practice. Late night shifts do you that kind of dirt. But, as per my chosen my profession, I've been determined as ever to never have a stain on me. Arriving in the store my eyes refocused, darting - fiction section, contemporary. And there it was, the text that postively became the lighthouse of my maelstrom readership.
I struggled to eat my first read through because it piqued my appetite. Turning pages inspired a photo-fletcherism, an affect of the astringent prosaicism of the author's language. When I hunkered down to it, I understood felicitous verse. Over the noise of crowded heartbeats I sighed at the emergent incongruity of emotions our unnamed narrator navigated. Before my shifts I paused in silent awe at the axiomatic jabs of place dysphoria. I ended the book and went through making dogears as is my poor habit when i cant time to annotate in pencil.
It is the latter point of place dysphoria that spurred me to load an analogical map of what this text specifically means to me. I'm a self-ascribed "writer" of a particular genre. If it genre were a neighbourhood mine would be called, "building review in architectural discourse." Evidently, it is subculture of a broader cultural frame, and following the unnamed narrator of "A Minor Chorus" through their journalist-like beat of conversation with key personages and family, earthing as a potency of storytelling jumped scales for me and my then-interest in narrating the city I live in.
After my readthrough i read an October 2020 interview the Author had for BOMB Magazine with Layli Long Soldier before the book was published. The Author describes coming to a metafictional idea of the book as a kind of "Landing there." Right then, the angle of (story)telling I had gathered in the book opened me a question I hadn't considered: why do I need to write about the city and for whom does my writing gather?
I found a mirror-image in the unnamed narrator's yearning after the shape of an elusive novel. My borrowed logic this was simply after a thorough account of the relationships I saw as meaningful and beautiful. However, the loneliness of my ambition interupted my rhetorical goal. Pessoa says, "Beauty is the name of something that does not exist(,) which I give to things in exchange for the pleasure they give me. It signifies nothing." In my neighbourhood, beauty wa another name for every name place. In the silent search for 'a place to start' beauty fell like a mask from a wall of mounted trophies.
I know the lands I inhabit and live on are saturated with violences that obliterate the borrowed logic of my genre and it's attempt to account. It is not enough, and never will be. How do I proceed from this premise?
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This introduction to my little treatise will be broken into two, i appreciate how important my audiences attention to the work. I have decided to make a break here to carry on tomorrow. Below are my citations.
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Citations
Rosario Caballero “Re-viewing Space: Figurative Language in Architects’ Assessment of Built Space”, De Gruyter, 2006